He arranges to have a Friday night drink, somewhere off the Old Kent Road, with an old school friend who is, quite usefully, a civil servant. On the second pint he floats the question. If there were a scientist whose experiments had in some way derailed her, psychologically; had induced her to think she was talking to the dead…? She has not, he stresses, come to him as a client; he has met her in the course of his work; he is simply concerned. The old friend is reassuring. He will have a word. Someone will be in touch.
The response is surprisingly rapid. A phone call on Monday afternoon is followed, the very next morning, by two suited men being shown to his study. They stay for an hour and a half; refuse tea, make notes. Or one of them does, typing rapidly into the laptop, precarious as a cliff-top beach-house on his knees. The other asks questions that he reads from a form on a clipboard, his seriousness so disconcerting that Logan feels obliged to make small talk – to say how reassuring these last-century props, paper and clipboard – in the moments of silence between them. The other man gives him a switched-on-switched-off smile; Logan’s words clatter to the ground. Very quickly, he knows he is making a statement; the kind that will be catalogued. Never to be read to a court, be pored over by lawyers, but nevertheless it will be passed higher up for a judgement, sent down for execution. Should a Freedom of Information Request ever require the giving up of this hostage, it will emerge into the sunlight blindfolded with redactions.
After ninety minutes, the suited men leave with a brief flurry of handshakes. Jules sees them out. Logan stands in the sunlight of his upstairs window to watch the black car pulling out of the drive; right, to London. The note-taker, in the passenger seat, glances up as they round the gatepost, and Logan wonders if the man can see his face, or only the sunlight glinting from the pane.